We can play a smarter game in Latin America and the Caribbean | Opinion

The Miami Herald’s July 28 editorial, “While EU woos Latin America and the Caribbean, the U.S. plays hard to get” wisely called for greater Biden-administration strategic engagement with Latin America to rival the European Union’s efforts. It was timely and correct.

However, its message was inconsistent, referring to the explicitly anti-strategic policies that Sen. Marco Rubio and others promote, cheerleading for unilateral, “get-tough” policies that consistently fail.

The value of the EU’s strategic thinking about Latin America is manifest, and its effort to promote universal engagement, including inviting all Latin American countries to attend bi-annual summits regardless of political differences reflects the smart approach. This is what strategic thinking involves, separating permanently vital interests from annoying, yet transient, diversions. The Herald appropriately contrasts the EU approach with the paucity and episodic nature of of U.S. regional engagement and its narrow domestic focus on migration and suggests the United States is losing ground. We can tell you that we are.

Yet the suggestion that, in response to the EU’s stepped-up engagement, the United States should rely on the advice of Rubio, offered as an expert, whose prescriptions are tired and literally anti-strategic, involving sanctions, marginalization and division, begs credulity. Those approaches are global bywords for strategic failure. Tried and tested, they have only entrenched authoritarian regimes in power and created space for malign external actors like Russia and China to meddle.

How has this political straitjacket on Latin America policy harmed U.S. interests? First, Sens. Rubio and Rick Scott have personally withheld Senate confirmation of no less than a dozen U.S. ambassadors to the region since 2020, based on their view that President Biden is “soft” on dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Arguing foolishly that the United States legitimizes authoritarian regimes if they engage diplomatically with them, Florida’s politicians prefer to performatively sanction and denounce these regimes, in response to moneyed exile communities that fund their reelection campaigns.

Currently 10 of 24 American embassies in the Western Hemisphere are without ambassadors. Many who are in place waited over a year for confirmation. Panama, with its strategically important canal, was without an ambassador for over four and a half years. Chile for three and one half. You don’t influence a region when your diplomatic team plays absent its team captains.

Second, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart has proposed zeroing out all U.S. assistance to Colombia in 2024 because he doesn’t like the democratically elected president’s social agenda. This will severely impact a bipartisan partnership that has resulted in an undisputed turnaround in a country that was once on the verge of becoming a narco-failed state.

Third, Rep. Maria Elivira Salazar held a congressional hearing on July 27 entitled “Colombia’s Descent into Socialism,” portending a Cuba-style demise of Colombia. Administration witnesses and Democrats on the panel forcefully and factually pushed back on her Cassandra-like vision of Colombian Carnage. Yet she stubbornly asserted Colombia’s democracy is teetering on the brink when nothing could be farther from the truth. Like in our own country, political polarization runs deep in the Andean nation, but no serious observer would conclude there is to be a wholesale destruction of the Colombian state by the left or the right.

These are just a few of the counter-productive policy positions assumed by Florida’s congressional delegation, which anger regional leaders and make U.S. policy in the region both counterproductive and weak. As one Latin Foreign Minister watching Salazar’s hearing commented to one of us, “Is this about Colombia or about U.S. domestic politics?”

To be clear, we see much that is wrong about the Biden administration’s miserly approach to Latin America. It has failed to rally support for serious U.S. investment by the private sector. Its sclerotic assistance budgets for basic health, education, broadband expansion and health programs in the Americas reflect the low priority it gives the region. Israel alone receives more U.S. assistance than the entire region combined.

But unless and until South Florida’s influential legislators recognize that diplomacy, development, along with judicial and security cooperation must respond to mutual interests — and not unilateral U.S. diktats — the United States will be handicapped as it looks for genuine partners in a regional vital to us in every conceivable aspect of peace and prosperity.

And while the Biden administration plays that losing hand, China, Russia and the EU will wisely seek expanded opportunity and partnership in Latin America and the Caribbean, putting their domestic politics behind their national interests.

John D. Feeley was the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Panama from 2015-2018. He is the executive director of the Center for Media Integrity of the Americas. Scott Hamilton is a retired senior U.S. foreign service officer. His most recent assignments were consul general in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires in Cuba, and director for Central American Affairs in Washington, D.C.